Waiting for the Metro!

A metro is not just a big city but an underground train-system of the kind Kolkata and Delhi have and which Bangalore is now aspiring for. Today, there are sealed-off corridors all over Bangalore, partitioned from the rest of the road with green metallic signs saying ‘Metro’.

The good old ‘Plaza’ cinema-theatre on Bangalore’s MG Road has stopped screening movies for months, courtesy the sign saying ‘Metro’. ‘Plaza’ was where I watched Costa-Gavras’ “Missing” two decades ago and Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” in the mid 1990s. It was where, some five years ago, I watched Russell Crowe playing the Oscar-winning role of Maximus, the “Gladiator”, who quotes Marcus Aurelius: “When Death smiles at a man, all a man can do is smile back!” I could hear the dialogue of the movie at Plaza in the corner bookshop.

Once upon a time but not long, long ago, children would play games where if one child said “Statue!”, the other would stay absolutely still. The Metro is the game grown-up kids played in Kolkata, then Delhi. Now it’s Bangalore’s turn. Mumbai could be next!

It’s not just the roads or a cinema-theatre which has been frozen by the Metro. The four-acre rose-garden, which civic administrators of yesteryear planted, is also a partial victim. The city where people used to walk has now been reduced to a no-man Metro zone.

The boulevards — or promenades bordered with trees on the other side of MG Road —have now acquired their original meaning of the demolished fortifications of a town! Once the Metro becomes operational, the boulevardiers or men about town will be woken up by the underground rumbling of a train from their memories of a city that was once green.

The renowned writer U R Anantha Murthy has been known to wistfully hold forth on TV discussions about the Bangalore of the past where old men and children could cross the road safely. Today’s old men can’t walk on the pavements, thanks to the Metro zones. The other day, I was in Bangalore's first planned residential area of Jayanagar and was surprised by the broadness of the roads and the green, open spaces all around.

“All this will change once the Metro comes into being,” warned my cousin Ananthu who has returned home after years of working in the wilderness for the Border Roads Organisation. The pensioner’s paradise has become the devil’s workshop but not of the idle-mind kind! And the Metro is a border-sign to cut us off for ever from the Bangalore we knew!

The 19th century British novelist George Eliot wrote a book called ‘Silas Marner’ where the protagonist returns as an old man to the town where he grew up and is horrified to find that the road he lived in no longer exists, thanks to the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to the Metro, Bangaloreans could find huge chunks of their collective past missing for ever! The Bangalore of the Raj can only be glimpsed in sepia-toned photographs.

The boulevards of MG Road have been captured in technicolor by film directors who shot their romantic fantasy song-dance sequences there. These directors will now have to shoot their song-dance sequences in Paris which not only has a Metro but has preserved its boulevards!